09.07.1998

Dogmatic SWP abstractions

Around the left

For the SWP the theory of state capitalism is its defining position. In a sense, the SWP is an organisation based around the defence of this particular theory. Take the state capitalist plank away from the SWP’s theoretical cannon and the organisation starts to disintegrate, if not die. This is why we label the SWP an ideological sect. In the last analysis, the preservation of the theory replaces critical Marxist science, which has no preconceived analysis.

In the latest issue of Socialist Review, Tony Cliff takes up the state capitalist cudgels once again. His argument is less than convincing. As Cliff explains,

“In 1947, 51 years ago, I came to the conclusion that the Stalinist regime was state capitalist. I wrote a couple of books to develop the theory. But of course one cannot be sure of one’s own ideas unless the test of events confirms them. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes made it possible to confirm or refute the theory” (July).

Continuing in his clumsy fashion, Cliff argues:

“The collapse of the Stalinist regimes makes a postmortem possible. If Russia was a socialist country or the Stalinist regime was a workers’ state, even though a degenerated or deformed one, the collapse of Stalinism would have meant that a counterrevolution had taken place. In such circumstances, workers would have defended a workers’ state in the same way that workers always defended their unions, however rightwing and bureaucratic they may be, against those who are trying to eliminate the union altogether ... Did the workers in Russia and Eastern Europe defend the regime in 1989-91? Of course not. Workers in the countries were completely passive. There was less violence at the same time than during the miners’ strike in Britain in 1984-85. The only country where the regime was defended, and violently, was Romania; but it was not defended by workers, rather by the Securitate, the secret police.

“If there had been a counterrevolution, the people at the top of society would have been removed [Cliff seems to have forgotten that Stalin came to power in 1924 and carried out a counterrevolution in 1928 with the support of a large section of the urban proletariat]. But characteristic to the collapse of the Stalinist regimes was that the same personnel, the nomenklatura, who had managed the economy, society and politics under Stalinism, continued to be at the top. For the people at the top the years 1989-91 did not mark a step backward or a step forward, but a step sideways. Therefore, it is clear that there was not a qualitative change between the Stalinist regimes and what exists at presents in Russia and Eastern Europe. As at present no one denies that the regime is capitalist, it follows that it was capitalist before” (my emphasis).

Cliff’s false logic is howlingly obvious. There can only be two sorts of societies - socialist or capitalist. Nothing else. If it is not A, it must be B. Simple. JV Stalin’s Soviet Union clearly was not socialist. Therefore it must have been capitalist. So “it follows”, as Cliff would say, that Khrushchev’s Soviet Union was capitalist - as it was under Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov, Gorbachev ... and now Yeltsin. Nothing much has changed - if we are to swallow the analysis put forward by comrade Cliff.

To ‘prove’ his argument Tony Cliff has to obscure, if not obliterate, the differences between the capitalist states and the Soviet social formation: “Capital is dominated by the need for capital accumulation. Ford has to invest continually otherwise it will be beaten by General Motors. Competition between the capitalist enterprises forces every one of them to invest more and more, to accumulate more and more capital. Competition between the capitalists also forces every one of them to increase the exploitation of workers. The tyranny of capital over workers is the other side of the coin to competition between capitals.

“The same applies to the Stalinist tyranny towards the workers and peasants. The harsh exploitation, including the gulag, was the by-product of the competition between Russian capitalism and other capitalist powers, above all Nazi Germany.” Elsewhere he makes the extraordinary, not to say incredible, claim: “The laws of motion of the economy and of the Russian army were identical to those of world capitalism” (my emphasis).

All very neat and tidy. But false. The Soviet bureaucracy, under the leadership of Stalin and his vile servants, brought into being with the first five-year plan an exploitative politico-socio-economic formation that was neither capitalist nor socialist. To investigate and understand the true nature of this “freak” society requires painstaking scientific analysis and the development of new categories. We must not cling dogmatically to old abstractions. Life must guide theory.

But this does not mean we become ‘post-Marxists’ or postmodernists - shrilly announcing that Marxism is too ‘limiting’ for us. Quite the opposite. It is only by using the critical-scientific method developed by Karl Marx that we have any hope of getting to the bottom of the ‘Soviet question’.

Don Preston